Reviewing a Book I Haven’t Read (Because I Read the Abstract): Seana Shiffrin's "Democracy, Law, and the Empty Theology of Proceduralism"

I haven’t read Seana Shiffrin's Democratic Law (Oxford University Press, 2021). But I have read the abstract. And that’s enough to know what kind of book it is—and what kind of intellectual ecosystem it lives in.

Here’s the publisher's summary:

The book defends the intimate connection between democracy and law by focusing on how democracy permits us to be co-authors of our common community through the use of law. It argues that democratically forged laws are articulate public commitments we make to one another and they are uniquely capable of conveying our mutual respect for one another. For this reason, democratic law is morally imperative and morally inspirational.

To which I say: I’ve seen this movie before.

And I know how it ends.

The Myth of Co-Authorship

Let’s start with this idea that democracy makes us "co-authors of our common community."

This is one of the most worn-out myths in proceduralist liberalism: that voting, or representation, or simply living under a procedural democracy makes you an author of the laws that govern you.

But what do we actually know, given only that a society is a democracy?

Do we know who controls capital?
Do we know who owns the media? Academia? Publishing?
Do we know whether ordinary citizens can meaningfully enter public life?
Do we know how racial, ethnic, or religious conflict plays out?

We know nothing.

"Democracy" is a purely formal descriptor. It tells you how the system claims to make decisions—not who actually makes them, or to what end.

And so the idea that democratic law is a form of mutual moral authorship is, at best, a poetic illusion. More often, it’s propaganda dressed as political theory.

The Empty Sacrament

The claim that democratic law is "morally imperative and morally inspirational" is, in essence, a prayer. Not a philosophical argument. A prayer to the god of procedural fairness:

"Because we followed the rules, we are good."

This kind of thinking is central to Rawlsianism and its orbit: the belief that justice is not a matter of truth, or virtue, or character, but of design. That if you create the right structure, and simulate consent, and enforce neutrality, the result is not just legitimate, but inspiring.

This is theology without transcendence. It is bureaucracy masquerading as morality.

And it is precisely the kind of intellectual emptiness that has drained modern democratic societies of vitality.

The Real Danger of Proceduralism

Let me be clear: procedure matters. Rules matter. Institutions matter. No one wants to live in a society ruled by whim.

But when procedure becomes the sole source of legitimacy, something horrifying happens:

Truth stops mattering.
Justice becomes secondary.
And the system becomes unassailable—because it worked exactly as designed.

This is how democracies produce:

Wrongful convictions.
Corrupt economic policy.
Institutionalized mediocrity.

And then call it all "just" because it was done through the proper channels.

A Review of the Genre, Not Just the Book

Again: I haven’t read the book. Maybe it has nuance. Maybe it’s better than its abstract.

But I’ve read the genre. I’ve read enough Rawlsian-lite proceduralist political theory to know what this is likely to be: an attempt to smuggle substantive moral legitimacy out of an empty formal structure. A kind of ideological prestidigitation.

The core move is always the same:

Define a procedure (democracy).
Declare that procedure inherently moral.
Announce that its products are therefore worthy of respect.

But democracy is not inherently moral. Procedures are not inherently just. Laws are not inherently expressive of mutual respect.

Sometimes they are. Often they aren’t. But that depends on what they say and what they do.

Not on how they got written.

Final Thought

Shiffrin’s abstract is not just a statement about law. It is a symptom of a culture that wants to believe that process is enough. That if we build a machine that looks fair, we can stop asking whether it is.

But machines cannot love. They cannot grieve. They cannot forgive. They cannot see the singularity of a human life.

Only people can do that.

And any legal or moral system that forgets this—whether dressed up in robes, or footnotes, or procedural theory—will, eventually, do what all blind machines do:

It will crush the very thing it claimed to protect.